The Morning Joe panel backed up weatherman Al Roker in his Twitter tiff against New York City mayor Bill de Blasio. On Thursday, despite predictions of a winter storm and dangerous conditions, de Blasio made the “stunning” decision not to call off school. After initially opening up the schools, the city later canceled school for the remainder of the day, upsetting many city residents.

“Why are we risking things that we don’t have to?” asked meteorologist Bill Karins, who said the National Weather Services and other weathermen’s predictions were accurate.

Harold Ford Jr. called on the mayor to “own up” to his “confusing and bewildering” mistake, as Georgia governor Nathan Deal did when his state was unprepared for a snow storm. “Blaming meteorologists is not the right thing to do — I don’t think there was a meteorologist who did not predict this,” he said.

But there was one partial contrarian on the panel: Howard Dean felt criticism of de Blasio was “a bit of shakedown.” While Dean thought that de Blasio made the right decision in keeping schools open, he conceded that sending students home partway through the day was a mistake. And Dean said that the mayor ought not to have responded to Roker’s barbs. “If the TV weatherman wants to tweet, let him tweet — you don’t have to have an official response to that, that just makes it worse,” he said.